A bland, utterly silly, curiously provincial courtroom drama.

At least it cares enough to steal from the very best. Unfortunately, that's about all it cares about.

Sandra Bullock is a disheveled, grumpy, adorable mess in Premonition, a psychological thriller that was no doubt pitched as "Medium," only longer and brunette. Or maybe "The Eternal Sixth Sense of the Spotless Groundhog Day."

Maybe it's me, but I find it difficult to dislike any movie that has horses, guns and big hats in it.

The most surprising thing about the movie is that somebody bothered to make it in the first place.

Cedric the Entertainer is the best (and probably only) reason to take this "Vacation."

At every turn, the movie is less moving than the real-life events that inspired it.

Mostly, these guys carry on like spoiled children, complaining, roughhousing and badgering women to strip naked.

Somehow channeling the tone of both a Lifetime movie and an after-school special, Mothers and Daughters shambles into theaters oozing schlock and melodrama, just in time for Mother’s Day. This is no way to honor a beloved family member.

A lean, low-budget and claustrophobic mistaken-identity thriller that’s so stripped-down, it’s nearly nonexistent.

Seriously, though, watching New in Town left me feeling as pained as Zellweger, playing Lucy Hill, looks.

The movie is one of those can't-miss projects that, uh, misses...Altogether, this is about the most listlessly paced thriller you could imagine: Ashby's penchant for letting his actors improvise just results in endless dithering; and the image is weirdly flat -- the movie's shot almost entirely in profile. Actually, there aren't just 8 million ways to die -- now we know there are 8 million and 1. [25 Apr 1986, p.D2]

Time travels, but it sure doesn't fly by in this debacle.

The movie’s editing mishaps, unbelievable scenarios, overuse of music and computer-generated fakery distract from what should be a great ad­ven­ture.

Redundant, humorless and overlong screenplay.

Indeed, I'd say Undiscovered belongs on the WB, but that would be gravely unfair to the channel, which looks like the BBC in comparison.

Downey's direction is so flat that about 20 rock songs have been inserted to cover the dithering continuity with a semblance of rhythm. Like the flatulent and shattering noises, the score functions a distracting sound effect, camouflaging tattered swatches of "comedy." [10 June 1980, p.B2]

It's difficult to predict if audiences will be patient enough with Best Defense to allow it the shakedown time necessary to hit a funny stride. But the movie confirms a flair for comedy that may pay dividends when the filmmakers' rapport with the actors is strong enough to discipline and perhaps improve dodgy material. [25 Jul 1984, p.D3]

It’s wholesome but starchy fare: a story of sacrifice and good fortune that feels less like a movie than a marketing vehicle for the power of divine providence.

All in all, this is not a Jobe well done.

What saves “Battle” from complete irrelevancy is the undisputable fact that a scrappy underdog formula tends to work no matter what time period or sport.

The film has the whiff of easy paycheck. It looks glossy but is empty. It sheds light without gaining insight.

The film isn’t bad, although it is somewhat repetitive. If it has plot holes, conceptual laziness and an overreliance on dumb-insult humor, the film at least seems to know it. There are lots of self-referential jokes that acknowledge its own stupidity.

An adolescent romance that isn't smart enough to mirror "When Harry Met Sally" or crudely amusing enough to get close to "American Pie."

The drug-fueled romp turns ugly, sexist and misogynistic, as so many rap-star vehicles do.

Makes "Conan the Barbarian" seem like Dostoyevsky in its complexity.

Creepy, creepy, creepy -- and not in a good way.

Invasion USA might actually be fun in a campy way if it weren't so dourly exploitative.

Even by the forgiving standard of stuff-we-sit-through-for-our-kids, Ratchet & Clank falls short.

A pocket of infection on the skin of the American body cultural.

Any more than two writers on a movie usually spells trouble. On the other hand, that two of the three scribes responsible for Fool's Gold have previously specialized in horror makes perfect sense.

A lurid, loopy, utterly ludicrous enterprise.

Sexist, racist, overlong, dull, visually ugly and, worst of all, unfunny, “Kasbah” squanders its cast.

There are no surprises here, only blandly reassuring homilies.

In the end, I can't think of a movie that matters less than Just My Luck. It's just negligible.

The movie's gentle and friendly, but nowhere close to exciting. It would be hard to believe that anyone involved with this production --considers Snow Dogs anything more than phoned-in business as usual.

Director-star Kevin Costner falls head over heels in love with himself in this nihilistic, post-apocalyptic clunker about a loner who becomes a reluctant sperm donor, role model and inevitably a godsend to what's left of America.

An animated King and I? Now there's torture, especially in this wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.

Although Boniadi makes Shirin nearly as likable as she’s supposed to be, writer-director Ramin Niami’s movie is crudely contrived and sloppily edited.

American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

Even as characters are tweaked and actors bring a slightly different energy than his other movies, The Best of Me is still the same mushy Nicholas Sparks adaptation with drama so overwrought audience members can’t help but laugh — at least until they’re sniffling during the closing credits.

The depiction of an always energetic and often furious Breitbart may please the man’s followers. But Marcus makes little effort to illuminate Breitbart’s character or motivation, so this high-pitched portrait ends up a little flat.

Like a wounded yeti, Batman & Robin drags itself through icicle-heavy sets, dry-ice fog and choking jungle vines, before dying in a frozen heap. Unfortunately, that demise occurs about 20 minutes into the movie, which leaves you in the cold for approximately 106 minutes.

Here is a Neil Simon movie with all of his banality, but none of his humor -- a sort of "The Nod Couple." [30 March 1985, p.G3]

The whole thing is coarse and vulgar, as it hides its low fascinations behind a scrim of Holocaust piety until it becomes pure kitsch.

Suffers from an increasingly common movie defect: appealing, sharply drawn supporting characters, and a cast of main characters that is as unlikely as it is unlikable.

The movie that Disney uses to explore this premise drips with so much corporate good-neighbor syrup, you might want to wear something waterproof. And Penn's performance is, at best, ripe for discussion.

A vicious anti-Catholic diatribe disguised as an audition tape for MTV.

The movie — which looks and sounds like a more brutal Bond knockoff — is at least consistently stylish, though its tone is less assured.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is a prime example of the principle of diminishing reruns.

The Other Sister is sanctimonious, sanitized fare primarily preoccupied with patting its own back and plucking our heartstrings.

Return to the Blue Lagoon, which doesn't star Brooke Shields or that blond guy, makes the original Blue Lagoon look like Citizen Kane.

Both assaultive and tiresome, A Good Day to Die Hard barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.

Doesn't orchestrate the scares with much finesse.

Saddled with leaden lead performances, hobbled by an arch, incoherent script and pokey pacing, the new, improved Cowgirls is a miscarriage - misconceived, miscast, miserably boring.

It's all wildly implausible and occasionally fun, but it could be so much better if director Randall Miller (who co-wrote the screenplay) had thrown in a little more character development and excised a half-dozen crazy plot twists.

As you watch Howard the Duck, you get the vivid sensation that you're watching not a movie, but a pile of money being poured down the drain. [02 Aug 1986, p.G10]

Ultimately, the movie just doesn’t justify its outrageous bid to turn a solemn tale of self-sacrifice into swaggering global-marketplace entertainment.

London Has Fallen is remarkable only because of how much worse it is than its inane predecessor.

This is a movie that doesn't just make you feel dumb, it makes you feel as if your head has been hollowed out and pumped full of Cheez Whiz.

Graveyard Shift is the latest failed attempt to visualize what King imagines so well. The acting and directing are substandard. Even the hackneyed plot is barely turned over.

You won't feel enlightened, just let down

You know a movie is in trouble when its biggest laughs come not from its lead players but from a dog and a car

The Amityville Horror is a feeble excuse for a haunted-house thriller, but given the source, who could ask for more?

Those immortals keep noting that there can be only one. Perhaps they mean there should have been only one.

A sweet and funny take on the crossed-wire romantic couplings of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'

An amiably dopey teen movie.

Content to pick up where the skid marks from "Smokey and the Bandit II" left off, The Cannonball Run quickly establishes itself as an aggressive shambles, the latest exercise in amateurism from facetious professionals. [20 June 1981, p.B1]

The film is smart, literary, nuanced, slightly stagy — and pedigreed to within an inch of its life. It practically reeks of dusty, yellowed pages and engraved-leather bookbinding.

Imagine National Lampoon's Animal House without the raunch, originality or wit and you have Midnight Madness. [08 Feb 1980, p.16]

As it is, The Divide is simply noxious for noxiousness's sake. French director Xavier Gens and writers Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean almost seem to take a kind of perverse pride in seeing how far they can go.

Even the susceptible softies, who always cry at weddings, will probably leave the theater dry-eyed, not to mention feeling a little empty inside.

Screenwriter Lona Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann spare no attempt to show characters at their zaniest, wackiest or most grotesque. The effect is disconcerting. Is this light comedy or dark satire? It ends up being neither.

Avoid this movie unless a) your child has refused to eat until you take him or her, or b) your house is being fumigated to kill an infestation of mosquitoes with the West Nile virus.

See You in Valhalla, which is being released simultaneously in select theaters and on demand, is as deadly as its funereal subject matter.

Winds up answering the question of what "Shrek" hath wrought, and between its plastic-looking visuals and cynical attitude, the news isn't good. Lacking the genuine wit and humanism of that film and any number of forebears, this one deserves its dumpin'.

Ernest keeps up his filibuster of inane chatter, shifting from one comic voice, one accent, to another with impressive dexterity. That voice of his is a real gift. Too bad we have to look at him too. [12 Nov 1993, p.C6]

The self-conscious affectation of the film would be funny, were it not so smug.

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is nearly as stilted, didactic and simplistic as Rand's free-market fable.

The movie proceeds in near darkness, perhaps to obscure its shoddy special effects, but the pervasive gloom is less discouraging than star Nicolas Cage's indifferent performance.

Pleasingly glossy, refreshingly snarky and startlingly sexy.

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

What Michael Bay did for the Hollywood blockbuster with his second "Transformers" movie, Jared Hess has now done for the low-budget indie with Gentlemen Broncos -- namely, stain an entire genre with a sense of soulless calculation.

Director James McTeigue frequently collaborates with the visionary Wachowski siblings, and he directed V for Vendetta. How the man who blew up Parliament in such memorably spectacular fashion can’t add some originality to Philip Shelby’s script is the movie’s only real mystery.

The interludes of terror are strictly functional and literal-minded: If it's not a murder spectacle, it's a tease that anticipates a subsequent atrocity. [25 Nov 1983, p.C2]

An insensitive, unfunny cringer from the entrepreneurial writer-director that should have come with a gift receipt.

Lazy humor and familiar plotting aside, Pixels at least gets a little mileage out of its affection for the 1980s.

Here's my favorite part: It's only 87 minutes long. But for the most part, this movie is just another bland, fair-to-middling vehicle for two emerging, fledgling stars.

Kids who love Pokemon movies are no doubt going to see this movie, and they'll have a blast watching it. Very soon they will become older and more sensible and understand how terrible these movies are.

Baby, when you walk out of a movie thinking, "Say, that Heather Locklear was pretty darn good," the movie's got some problems!

Shamelessly manipulative in a crude, bullying way.

The battles are boring and the jokes as flat as old 7-Up, but the film's color palette and creatures -- from teeny buzzing critters to a monster that looks like a giant dust mite -- offer a lot to see. It's just not enough to save the convoluted story.

It's zany. Actually, it's so zany it's almost creepy.

Chris Farley walks into walls, trips over invisible banana peels and otherwise makes a fat ass of himself in this imbecilic, slapstick adventure from the producers of "Dumb and Dumber."

Bland, workmanlike and instantly forgettable.

Mortdecai succeeds more as a talky farce than an action-packed adventure. But it would be even better if Mortdecai weren’t about Mortdecai at all.

Nina filters the singer’s voice — and her life — through tinny-sounding speakers and an out-of-focus lens.

Fans of the book will despise it, others will just find it tries too hard. If you want to see the masters of the universe chastened, see "Wall Street." This is a story of redeemed white guys.